🤖 Automation & agents

New in automation & agents this week

Omnara: An open-source (Apache 2.0), self-hostable take on Claude Managed Agents and OpenAI's Agents API. Create an agent with one API call and Omnara runs the loop, gives it sandboxes for shell commands, and handles secrets, permissions, and approvals. Every step lands in a Postgres event log, so agents survive restarts and cost nothing while idle. It works with any model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Bedrock, Ollama), has MCP, skills, memory, subagents, and scheduled triggers, and runs on one box with Docker Compose. There's also a hosted cloud. source ↗

Inception Mercury 3: A diffusion LLM that writes tokens in parallel instead of one at a time. Inception clocks it at 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs, with a 1M-token context, tool calling, and JSON outputs. It's OpenAI API compatible and live on Inception's API, OpenRouter, Baseten, and Vercel at a launch price of $0.10 in and $0.35 out per million tokens (half off), and new API keys get 100 million free tokens. source ↗

WhatsApp MCP (free on Cloudflare): A free, open-source, read-only MCP server that lets Claude or any agent search and read your own personal WhatsApp messages. It runs on Cloudflare Workers, so there's no server to babysit, and it pulls contact names from Google so search isn't just phone numbers. It's single-user by design. source ↗

Craft Agents: An open-source desktop app for running agents locally with your own model: Claude, ChatGPT, OpenRouter, or Ollama. Tell it "add Linear as a source" and it wires up the API or MCP server itself, and a built-in browser covers sites with no API. source ↗

Perplexity pplx-decider v1.2: Perplexity shipped new open-weight decision models in two sizes (27B and a 4B Flash) that answer with structured calls on text and images. It says they're up to 5x faster, Flash is the top 4B model on the Decision Index, and both are on OpenRouter. source ↗